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Oh, you beat me to it! :D

I appreciate the author being vulnerable like this in a public setting. It's easy to see why it would be scary, especially since admitting being wrong or not knowing something can easily be turned into questioning one's overall competence.

I wish we'd be more open about our flaws and knowledge gaps in general. I think we'd all benefit.


I had an old colleague (at various points he was my boss, colleague, and subordinate at different places) that really opened my eyes up to the power of saying you don’t know how to do something.

I used to also fear appearing incompetent if I admitted to not knowing too many things, so I would avoid showing my knowledge gaps whenever possible.

However, this colleague was the exact opposite. He would gleefully tell people he had no idea how to do certain things, would be a ready listener when the person he was talking to explained how it worked, and would heap praise on the person for their knowledge and teaching skills. He would always defer to other people as experts when he didn’t know, and would make sure our bosses and coworkers knew who had helped him and how much they knew about the topic.

What I saw and experienced was that this did NOT, in any way shape or form, make people think less of him. It did the exact opposite. First, it made people REALLY happy to help him with stuff; he made you feel so smart and capable when you explained things and helped him, everyone jumped at the opportunity to show him things. He learned so much because he made everyone excited to teach him, and made his coworkers feel smart and appreciated for their knowledge.

And then, when he did speak with confidence on a subject, everyone knew he wasn’t bullshitting, because we knew he never faked it. Since he gave everyone else the chances to be the expert and deferred all the time, you didn’t get the one-upmanship you often get when tech people are trying to prove their bonafides. People were happy to listen to him because he first listened to them.

I have really tried to emulate him in my career. I go out of my way to praise and thank people who help me, always try to immediately admit where my skills and experience lack, and don’t try to prove myself in subjects I don’t really know that well. It has worked well for me in my career, as well.


The "why I was afraid to admit it" is by far the best part of this. It gives a lot more insight and ideas to combat it.


The suggestion to have the server return the table directly starts bringing presentational concerns into the backend, which I am not a big fan of.

Having the server return plain JSON means the APIs can be reused across products effortlessly and also means that all style changes can be done in the same codebase.

I get reminded of how important this is every time I get to work on an old project that has APIs return HTML that is then being inserted into the DOM by something like jQuery. Figuring it out and updating it is typically a huge mess.


If you control the full stack like in the article, you could have a server backend server the JSON, and another backend taking that and serving HTML, if you wanted.

Edit: This could still be way simpler than the "hydration" approach which is so popular.


Yes, the backend-for-frontend (BFF) architecture is an excellent fit for this purpose.


> Having the server return plain JSON means the APIs can be reused across products effortlessly and also means that all style changes can be done in the same codebase.

How many products actually share the same server backend? Do they all organise the same data on the same pages? If no, then you already need per-product APIs to avoid making O(N) fetches from the client side Having your backend be aware of what is being presented is rarely a bad thing


Yes, China, the bastion of free speech...

https://freedomhouse.org/country/china/freedom-world/2025


I know HN takes a dim view on them, but that post was a joke. Of _course_ China isn't a bastion of free speech, that is why the joke is funny.


I think HN has a higher than average number of people who are unable to detect irony or sarcasm.


Due to Poe's law, one can never be sure if such views are expressed genuinely.


I personally find the revised designs the author proposes worse than the originals. Sure, the extra space allows larger text and icons, but the overall design quality starts lacking in my opinion.

Maybe I am conditioned to like cards by their excessive use in existing designs, but it might also just be that cards look better, and therefore make the product appear more polished and the site more inviting to use and read. It might not be the most minimal possible design, but a site being pretty is great if functionality doesn't suffer.


Brave however is riddled with Crypto and AI crap. It doesn't have any useable support for multiple profiles, too: last time I tried it, it would end up showing various errors on every startup and you couldn't have two profiles in the same window.


Hamburger menu > more tools > add new profile

Once you have more than one profile, you'll see the switcher in the top right.

Also, turn off all crypto/ai stuff in settings. I did and I never see it.

It's really not that much.


I just start Librewolf with -P and keep profiles in separate windows. Easy, already fully supported, and allows things like different themes to highlight the fact I am using different profiles.


What does "riddled with Crypto and AI crap" mean here?


If you download Brave and run it you'll see; many pop-ups and random things in the UI you don't want


I've been running it for years; I see none of what you mention. I turned off a couple of settings (literally took <5 minutes) and I don't see anything crypto or AI related anymore.


Same. I’ve been using it exclusively on macOS and iOS for a few years now. When you first open it they do show you all those features but as ochronous said you can completely disable them. If they forced crypto and AI on me I’d be out in a flash.


To me, any other browser's initial "hello" screens are similarly "annoying", including Firefox. It's just a setup hurdle one needs to get over.


Zen still has some annoying shortcomings, like missing Widevine DRM or the dev tools opening up annoyingly slow. The potential is there, but it wasn't quite daily drivable as a developer for me just yet as of a few weeks ago.

Once it gets there, I too will finally leave Arc behind. Until then, while it is on life support, Arc actually works. I really wish The Browser Company would just own up to their fuck up and revive it.


Regarding the DRM support, they are trying to get Widevine license from Google [1] but for some reason Google approval process is taking too long.

[1] https://docs.zen-browser.app/faq#why-cant-zen-browser-play-d...


An alternative that works very well for signatures too is Perfect Freehand (by the guy behind TLDRaw)

https://perfect-freehand-example.vercel.app/


This is fantastic! Never in my life could I input my signature with a mouse, and have it come out this close to how it looks like the pen-and-paper version. Mindblowing, as it worked like so out of the box.


That looks much better indeed, wasn't able to write anything with the OP's library.


The OP's library gas settings if you scroll down. I found these values work well on my phone: 20, 0.05, 5


Using a trackball I couldn't get this to work noticeably better than just plain paintbrush input in MS Paint. Conversely the one from TFA took me a little more time to get the hang of but I got a lot better control with it.


Is it allowed to modify the signature someone puts digitally on a document? Because that's what this does. Is that not an issue?


That's also what a pen does, but we haven't banned pens. Don't forge signatures, it's illegal.


Stop, you are making too much sense. /s

(I honestly am baffled that things like this have to be said.)


Me too, but alas, they do :(


Have you met Preview's Tools > Annotate > Signature?

If you're concerned about people modifying a document after you share it out, consider using a digital signature or a hash.


I feel like if you're modifying the signature after they sign it and approve it - that could be a problem. As long as the modifications are applied in real-time (or with explicit user confirmation after modification), I think it is morally okay (and probably legally, but I'm not a lawyer).

You may find users who get mad if your settings are too aggressive though, and if they're unable to get a signature that they approve of.


What makes you say the library is modifying the signature? (It’s not)


Given it a bit of thought (as I was also puzzled), I think the comment was about the modification compared to a normal way of doing it. So if I would normally write a scribble with angular lines for a signature, and it might be consistent across different places, this brush could smooth it out and modify what it might be.


The Top 81% calculation in the game is not as good as it may sound. Top 100% means you are at the bottom. You can confirm this by just losing immediately, which will place you in the Top 9X%.


It's confusing. Would be better to have a rank.

And on my phone my finger gets in the way of seeing some of the bullets. Would be easier with a mouse.


> The keyboard change is typical of Apple's meticulous attention to detail, even if it took more than a quarter-century to implement.

I thought this paragraph was absolutely hilarious. Especially if they had such meticulous attention to detail, it wouldn't have taken decades. The article is a joke.


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